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Friday 17 April 2026
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for what we mean by Science Fiction; here for the masthead; here for some Statistics; here for the Acknowledgments; here for the FAQ; here for advice on citations. Find entries via the search box above (more details here) or browse the menu categories in the grey bar at the top of this page.
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Watson, Ian
(1943-2026) UK teacher and author who lectured in English in Tanzania (1965-1967) and Tokyo (1967-1970) before beginning to publish sf with "Roof Garden Under Saturn" for New Worlds in 1969; he then taught Future Studies for six years at Birmingham Polytechnic, taking there one of the first academic courses in sf in the UK; he became a full-time writer in 1976, publishing around 200 short stories since 1969 at a gradually increasing tempo and with visibly ...
Conly, Jane Leslie
(1948- ) US author, daughter of Robert C O'Brien; her first work comprised a two-part continuation of her father's Mrs Frisby and the Rats of NIMH (1971) with Rasco and the Rats of NIMH (1986) and R. T., Margaret, and the Rats of NIMH (1991), carrying the story of the race of intelligent, articulate, laboratory Rats into new territories: first a rural setting where the ...
Ferguson, Neil
(1947- ) UK author who began publishing sf with "The Monroe Doctrine" for Interzone, Winter 1983/1984, and through the 1980s released several sharply conceived tales, revealing more than once a deep interest in US life. / His first book, Bars of America (coll 1986), not sf, is a collection of tales and musings set in the heart of that country. His first sf novel, Putting Out (1988), presents a ...
Booth, Pat
(1929-2018) New Zealand newspaper journalist (chiefly with The Auckland Star), local-area politician and author, one of whose sixteen books is sf: Long Night Among the Stars (1961) sensitively depicts the human interactions of the crew of a Spaceship in the Near Future. This author should not be confused with the female Pat Booth (1943-2009) who wrote All for Love (1993), a medical fantasy ...
Macklem, Francesca
(1922-2003) US teacher who taught courses in parapsychology, and author of Tomorrow and Forever (1984), a Near Future tale set in a Dystopian America. [JC]
Robinson, Roger
(1943- ) UK computer programmer, bibliographer and publisher, active in UK Fandom for many years. The Writings of Henry Kenneth Bulmer (1983 chap; rev 1984 chap) is an exhaustive Bibliography of one of the most prolific sf writers, Kenneth Bulmer, and Who's Hugh?: An SF Reader's Guide to Pseudonyms (1987) is similarly exhaustive in its ...